Tumor vaccines

Abstract

A tumor vaccine which comprises a microparticle or a lysate prepared from a solidified tumor material selected from the group consisting of a tumor tissue, a tumor cell, and a component thereof, and at least one cytokine and / or cytokine-inducing agent (e.g., a granulocyte-macrophage-colony stimulating factor and / or interleukin-2 and the like), and optionally an adjuvant. The vaccine can be easily prepared and widely applied for prevention of recurrence, inhibition of metastasis and therapeutic treatment regardless of a type of a tumor, and has excellent antitumor effect.

Description

[0001]The U.S. Government has a paid-up license in this invention and the right in limited circumstances to require the patent owner to license others on reasonable terms as provided for by the terms of Grant No. RO1 CA68011 awarded by The National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute.TECHNICAL FIELD[0002]The present invention relates to a tumor vaccine useful for prevention of recurrence, inhibition of metastasis and therapeutic treatment of tumors.BACKGROUND ART[0003]The tumor vaccine therapy is to activate immune system in vivo, particularly killer lymphocytes that play a key role in cellular immune responses, especially cytolytic T lymphocytes (hereinafter abbreviated as “CTL”), to specifically kill tumor cells without damaging normal cells, and to expect prevention of recurrence of the tumor, inhibition of metastasis, or cure of the established tumor.[0004]Various kinds of tumor vaccines have been developed (Pardoll, D. M., Nature Med., 4(5 Suppl), pp. 525-531, 1998)...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011]An object of the present invention is to provide a tumor vaccine which can be simply handled, generally applied for prevention of tumor recurrence, inhibition of metastasis and therapeutic treatment, regardless of a type of a tumor, and also has a strong antitumor effect.

[0012]The inventors of the present invention conducted intensive studies to achieve the foregoing object. As a result, they found that the prevention of tumor recurrence, inhibition of metastasis, and therapeutic treatment can be achieved with high efficiency by using a material solidified from tumor tissues, tumor cells, or components thereof by a fixation operation, and processing the material into microparticles in a size that can be phagocytosed by antigen-presenting cells, or lysing the material by a lysation operation, and then using the resulting product as a tumor vaccine in combination with at least one kind of cytokines.

Problems solved by technology

However, any of the above tumor vaccines is advantageous from some aspects while disadvantageous from other points of view.

The human MHC is highly diverse, and consequently, clinical cases are very limited in which those tumor antigenic peptides can meet the MHC.

However, only a trace amount of the tumor antigenic peptide can be extracted from tumor tissues, and it is often impossible to concentrate the extract when the amount of the tumor as a raw material is small.

Therefore, the extract cannot be administered in a large amount such as identified and synthesized tumor antigen peptides, and effects are limited.

However, peripheral blood or bone marrow for isolation and preparation of the antigen-presenting cell, especially a dendritic cell having strong antigen presenting capability, should be derived from the patient who bears the tumor and is to be applied with the tumor vaccine therapy to prevent dangerous graft-versus-host-disease (hereinafter abbreviated to “GVHD”), which requires a highly skilled technique and is complicated.

Methods (4) and (5) have the same problem as that of Method (3), and in addition, a fusion process is very complicated in Method (5).

Method (7) is also complicated and costly because the tumor cells are obtained by mass culture, and moreover, the method has a problem in that the amount of the tumor antigen contained in the tumor cells per se is very small.

However, the method remains unsuccessful in tumor cells with low antigenicity.

Genetic therapies of Methods (8) and (9) are extraordinarily complicated in procedures to obtain approval for the treatment, as well as in therapeutic operations.

Even when cytokines are formulated as controlled release preparations by the method of Golumbek et al., a complication still remains in preparation of X-ray-irradiated live tumor cells.

From this point of view, methods involving administration of live tumor cells or antigen-presenting cells as a part of a tumor vaccine have problems in that they are technically very complicated as operations under a live state are required.

The operations are further complicated for a genetic therapy.

However, there are a large variety of tumor antigenic peptides, and additionally, due to restriction from MHC molecules of a patient individual, it often cannot be appropriately determine which of tumor antigenic peptides is applicable to the patient individual, which may limit the application.

However, this method has a problem in that purification and large-scale preparation of the tumor antigenic protein, per se, is difficult.

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